Behind His Eyes
by Caitiy
Summary: Solace can come from some of the most unlikeliest of sources.


Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or the characters contained therein, they belong to Masashi Kishimoto who is kind enough to let fans write fiction. I make no profit from this nor do I intend to.

A/N: I took a trip on the wayback machine to the old KakaSaku Fanfiction Archive and found a few more one-shots that didn't make the migration over to ff.n. This is one of them. It's actually the result of a prompt. I used to LOVE getting prompts as I like puzzles and I always felt that prompts were something like puzzles where you're given the pieces and told to make something of them. (That and my imagination generally needs a kick-start if I want to write something new.) Anyway, I'm sincerely sorry that I do not remember who originally submitted the prompt but, I will post the prompt itself below.

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Behind His Eyes

"Hmm… What's this at the back of your closet?"

The question had been asked by Sakura, who was determinedly trying to put some order into her former sensei's living quarters. If she was going to stay with him for a couple weeks, then, she had told him, she would be darned if she would live in the mess of an average bachelor shinobi's apartment. Thus, she had set about methodologically cleaning each room until, finally, only his bedroom and closet remained untouched by her busy hands.

"Eh?" asked Kakashi, with a little bit of alarm as his mind leapt to a certain cardboard box he usually kept out of sight at the back of the closet. After a moment's panicked thought, he remembered that he had had the foresight to move it to a safer location ( _i.e._ beneath a loose floorboard under his bed) before his well intentioned, but still young, former student cleaned her way into his bedroom.

Having not waited for Kakashi's response, the pink haired medic pulled a strangely-shaped case from his closet and, her eyebrow raised in question, held it up for inspection. "A guitar?"

His eye widened in surprise – he hadn't realized that he had kept the tatty old thing. "Hmm. I didn't know I still had that in there… I guess I didn't get rid of it after all…" he trailed off in thought.

Curious, she opened the case and extracted the elderly instrument. She turned to him once more. "If you have one, then you must know how to play it."

"Er… not exactly," he answered. Against his will, his mind traveled back in time to when he had first acquired the musical instrument – he had just received his Sharingan, and he had needed something to help him learn how to use it. With a lot of practice, he had been able to master not only the eye, but the guitar as well.

"What do you mean, 'not exactly'? You _have_ a guitar. Why on earth would you have one if you didn't know how to play it?"

"Well, I _do_ know how to play. I just… choose not to."

"Oh…" She frowned for a couple moments, thinking about what he had said. Then, she put on her largest, most charming smile. "Would you play something for me?"

He eyed her speculatively as he weighed his options. Sakura was currently taking care of him while he recuperated from his last mission, which had left him with a broken arm and leg as well as enough bruises and abrasions to make moving more than a couple feet at a time a major endeavor. Unfortunately for him, Tsunade had declared she was completely fed up with both him and his lack of initiative to have any of his injuries dealt with in a timely manner; therefore, she had ordered all medics _not_ to heal him using any of the more advanced methods. Secretly, Kakashi suspected it was the Godaime's way of getting him to take some time off from the many missions he had been completing without any downtime in-between.

Then, no less than two days later, Sakura had taken it upon herself to set up camp in his apartment to play nurse. He had surmised this was out of some misplaced sense of guilt since his latest injuries had, in fact, been incurred while protecting her. She had been too busy healing their other teammates – whose injuries had been much more serious than his own – to defend herself from enemy shinobi. Regrettably, that healing had taken everything she had had... leaving nothing for him. And so, here she was, determined to care for him in his incapacitated state.

Apparently Tsunade had unbent enough to allow the pink haired medic to cut down on some of her shifts at the hospital so she could. Kakashi had to wonder what sort of fast talking his former student had done in order to accomplish this; the busty, blonde haired woman had become quite possessive of the talented younger medic's time and energies ever since Sakura had made a couple major breakthroughs in her areas of research at the hospital. The Hokage had been nothing less than quick to capitalize on her apprentice's talents as soon as they surfaced. As he was pondering the situation, it occurred to him that, perhaps, Sakura's new value to the village may have played a part in the Godaime's decision to allow her the time necessary to take on an almost fulltime care patient – better to have a happy researcher than a guilty, sulky one.

"Please?" Sakura tried again, her smile wavering just a little as her patience started to wear thin.

"Ah… I don't know…" he stalled, though he wondered what the chances were of her continuing to care for him if he refused. Unhappily, he had to admit that he had gotten used to having her around while he recovered – and that he was not yet ready to cope with the many difficulties the loss of her help would represent.

" _Pretty_ _please_?" She batted her eyelashes at him, reminding the silver haired man that she was still young despite her advanced medical skills.

He sighed, finding himself unable to refuse. "Fine, fine… bring it to me. Just don't expect much. It's been… years since I last played."

Grinning happily, she handed him the guitar, slipped into the chair she had placed next to his bed and assumed a keen listening position.

As soon as Kakashi's fingers curled around the old musical instrument, memories flooded back to him and his hands moved of their own accord to carefully tune it. Once he had straightened out the strings, his fingers automatically started playing the last song he had learned. Luckily, he was able to use the fingers of his broken arm just enough to pick the strings, leaving his unbroken one to work the frets. As he played, his eye slowly closed and he lost himself to the song, thinking of little else than the motions of playing and the slight compensations necessary to playing with a broken arm.

When his hands at last stopped moving, he slowly opened his eye to glance at his student and was surprised to see her chin wobbling a little. Then he spotted the telltale brightness in her eyes which would soon become tears if he didn't do something about it.

"Come on, Sakura... I know it's been a while since I last played, but it wasn't _that_ bad." He smiled sheepishly, trying to lighten the mood a little.

Sakura sniffed a little. She had recognized the song almost immediately – it had been written and originally performed by one of her father's favorite groups – and had been dumbfounded that her former sensei would choose to play it. A very small part of her was secretly glad that he hadn't chosen to sing the accompanying lyrics because, other than the fact that she didn't think she could handle something so strange as hearing him sing, she knew she would have let the tears go after the first chorus. The song was about a man in serious emotional pain and she didn't like to think of her former sensei in such a way.

On some level, she knew Kakashi was human and, judging from his massive medical file, he had not had an easy time since he had become a shinobi. But, she had never imagined that he could be in such emotional pain. To her, he was nearly invincible – a strong and good man who was selfless when it came to his teammates or country. He couldn't be the broken man described in the song.

Meanwhile, Kakashi was watching the different emotions flash across her expression and trying to find something he could say to fix it, all the while mentally cursing himself for not paying attention to which song he played. "Sakura," he said gently, "I just played the first thing that came to mind, the last song I learned… It's old, probably older than you are…" he trailed off as he watched the threat of tears subside, but not fade completely.

"K-Kakashi… sensei… you're... you're not a bad man." Her eyes showed both concern and a little bit of confusion. "You're, you're just _not_ …"

He laughed a little nervously and raised his uninjured hand to the back of his neck to hide his embarrassment. "It's alright, Sakura. I don't –" He interrupted himself as he realized that she was subjecting him to a fierce scrutiny.

"I think, maybe... you might be a sad man… all that time at the memorial…" Her eyes started to fill with tears again as she spoke. "But, but you're _not_ a bad man… not at all."

He sighed and closed his eye, knowing that, for some strange reason, it was important to her that he acknowledge that he wasn't a bad man. The elite jonin couldn't understand why, but she seemed to be very intent on it.

"I know, Sakura. I know." Carefully, the injured man reached out to tousle her hair as best he could, hoping to convince her despite the fact that he couldn't seem to convince himself. He then let his hand slide down to her shoulder and smiled as lightly as he could. "I don't have blue eyes either."

Not feeling entirely persuaded, she hesitantly smiled at his attempt at humor and tried to convey her point one last time. "You _are_ a _good_ man… perverted and maybe a little lazy, but still good."

He laughed, feeling, oddly enough, a little lighter than he had for quite a while... probably, he realized, since he had mastered the guitar.

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A/N: Here's the original author's note with one edit for the link:

This was a prompt from a reader I took ages ago and finally finished last night while I was supposed to be cleaning:

However, I have a prompt for you, if you are interested.  
I was thinking the other day, after watching my honey play his guitar, that Kakashi would be very good at it, being able to copy other people's finger work and having excellent finger dexterity.  
And then I thought of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (if you ever watched it) where Buffy and Willow look for Giles and find him playing "behind blue eyes" in some random open mic night and they are freaked out, yet intrigued.  
Add to that this picture [[link won't work on ff.n so you'll have to find it yourselves, it's still there, on Deviantart, by cleverfoximages and is called The-Window-Collab-5528930]] drawn for Silvershine's "the window" - on the wall is a poster for a shinobi rock concert, and that just got me wondering...  
Heh.


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